Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
> If you mean to have an actual description of each specific result. ie.
> that the get_nodes requests can only produce nodes, then I don't see
> the point. Adding new elements would cause a lot of pain for no gain.
> Every program would have to be taught to ignore these new elements. We
> have a single DTD that describes all the possible results, I think
> that's good enough.
>> Note: it's possible that more advanced structure languages, like XML
> Schema or RelaxNG could do all this without the hassle, but I think
> DTDs are too limited for this.
The current DTD provides a superset of the XML-content all allowed
messages.
The problem is not the language here. There is currently no way the
validating XML-parser can know what kind of message it is parsing. Thus
it can not check a against the grammar of the specific message.
The traditional solution is to have one DTD per message. That would
solve the problem. Not sure that we want to go that way.
For definition in the wiki that approach can be used. I added in the
following table the specific OSM root element:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/OSM_Protocol_Version_0.5#Basic_Methods_for_Object_Access_and_Manipulation
Is it understandable?
Michael